Kendra is a DevOps Advocate at Redgate. She has taught developers and database administrators around the world to write fast, reliable code and to improve tempo and code quality in the software engineering lifecycle for databases.
Grant Fritchey, Kathi Kellenberger, and I recently collected our ideas and predictions about how the healthcare sector will evolve in 2021. We each drew up our responses on this independently, so it's fun to see some real commonalities here in where we see things going, and why.… Read more
Feature branching and pull requests are two important concepts when using Git. In this article, Kendra Little explains these patterns and even provides a video to demonstrate.… Read more
We recently had customer ask why SQL Monitor creates an Extended Events session to capture deadlock graphs, when SQL Server has a built-in system_health Extended Events trace which also captures deadlock information? There are a couple of reasons why a dedicated trace is desirable for capturing deadlock graphs, whether you are rolling your own monitoring … Read more
One question which comes up periodically from our Microsoft Data Platform customers is whether there is anything special that they need to do when implementing version control, continuous integration, and automated deployments for a production database which is a member of a SQL Server Availability Group. The good news is that deployments are quite straightforward. … Read more
Redgate has recently opened the 2021 State of Database DevOps Survey. Whether or not your organization does DevOps, I would love for you to take the survey. The survey will require around 15 minutes of your time, but I think it’s a great investment as it will benefit the whole community of database administrators, developers, and … Read more
I attended a training session at Redgate this week by Chris Spalton. Chris’ session topic was “An Introduction into Planning User Research.” Chris pointed out that there’s much more to User Research, but that planning the research is particularly important as it is the foundation for everything you do later. If you’re a database administrator … Read more
We recently received an interesting question in our Redgate forums from Peter Daniels about altering the order of deployments in database DevOps. The question includes the following scenario: Developer A makes changes – feature 1. This set of changes makes its way into the dev integration environment. Developer B makes changes – feature 2. This … Read more
Containers have already transformed the way application development works, but adoption has been slower for databases. Finally, the revolution is beginning. In this post, Kendra Little shares the two ways in which containers will dramatically change the way teams develop and deploy database changes.… Read more
While individual buzzwords will come in and out of fashion, the ideas at the heart of DevOps aren’t going anywhere. Like any good buzzword, DevOps may mean different things to different people. There are several good definitions of DevOps out there. My favorite definition comes from @IanColdwater, who defined DevOps in terms a teenager would understand: Devops … Read more
After fifteen years of heavy usage by developers and DBAs, it might seem like Microsoft’s free tool, SQL Server Management Studio, is about to go out of style. SSMS is no longer the cool new kid on the block: Microsoft has shown consistent effort to develop their new tool, Azure Data Studio (formerly known as … Read more
Today I got a bit closer to a meaningful definition of automation as it applies to the software development process. I’ve been turning this concept over in my head for a while, which is partly related to the dreaded question of licensing. Why should licensing an automation product be related to the number of users? … Read more
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” Phil Karlton I’m terrible at naming things. I recently wrote some quick code to reproduce a design problem and demonstrate several options for solutions, and later realized that I’d named my objects dbo.Foo, dbo.FooFoo, and dbo.Wat. But I feel strongly about … Read more
I hear from a lot of database administrators who are worried about being automated out of a job. These kinds of worries are not new. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen CTOs outsource large groups of IT jobs to different regions around the world to save money. IT has long been regarded as … Read more
Security, compliance, and data ethics are related concepts that everyone who works with software should know about, from the help desk to the C-level office… but almost everyone thinks that worrying about these things is someone else’s problem. As data breaches become increasingly common and data privacy regulations pass in more regions, there are increasing … Read more